Visual Studio 2013 Launch: Announcing Visual Studio Online

Today, I’m very excited to launch Visual Studio 2013 and .NET 4.5.1. I am also thrilled to announce Visual Studio Online, a collection of developer services that runs on Windows Azure and extends the development experience in the cloud. Visual Studio 2013 and Visual Studio Online represent the beginning of a new era for Visual Studio, combining a powerful desktop IDE with rich developer services in the cloud.

As a part of our Cloud OS vision, Visual Studio 2013 and .NET 4.5.1 enable developers to build modern applications. At a time when the devices and services transformation is changing software development across the industry, the developer is at the center of this transformation. Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio Online, MSDN and Azure offer the most complete experience for modern application development for the cloud.

To summarize some of the key news we shared today:

Visual Studio 2013 and .NET 4.5.1 are available globally, and provide the best tools for modern application development on all of Microsoft’s latest platforms

Visual Studio Online is a new offering, providing a rich collection of developer services in the cloud that work hand-in-hand with the Visual Studio IDE on the desktop

Hosted source control, work item tracking, agile planning, build and load testing services that were part of Team Foundation Service are now available in public preview as part of Visual Studio Online

Visual Studio Online Application Insights is a new service that provides a 360 degree view of your applications health, based on data about availability, performance and usage

Visual Studio Online “Monaco” is a coding environment for the cloud, in the cloud, offering light-weight, friction free developer experiences in the browser for targeted Azure development scenarios

Microsoft and Xamarin are collaborating to help .NET developers broaden the reach of their applications to additional devices, including iOS and Android

Visual Studio 2012 Update 4 is available today

You can get in-depth coverage of all of the Visual Studio 2013 launch details and announcements on Channel 9.

Visual Studio 2013

Visual Studio 2013 is the best tool for developers and teams to build and deliver modern, connected applications on all of Microsoft’s latest platforms. From Windows Azure and Windows Server 2012 R2 to Windows 8.1 and Office 365, Visual Studio 2013 provides development tools that help developers build great applications. Support for live debugging Azure sites from Visual Studio means you can set a breakpoint in a running service in the cloud, and step through it directly from Visual Studio. The new Cloud Business Application project type lets you build next-generation business applications leveraging Office 365 and Azure. And features like Energy Profiling and UI Responsiveness diagnostics make it easier than ever to build 5-star applications for the Windows Store.

For individual developers, Visual Studio 2013 brings great new developer productivity features. Features like Peek Definition and CodeLens provide key information about your code right where you are working in the Visual Studio editor.

And for teams, Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013 offer new capabilities from Agile Portfolio Management to support for Git source control to the new Team Room feature. In partnership with Windows Server and Systems Center, we’ve enabled some great DevOps scenarios for on premise development. And we’ve integrated new Release Management features to automate deployment and do continuous delivery on the cloud.

For more on what’s new in Visual Studio 2013, .NET 4.5.1 and Team Foundation Server 2013 see What’s New.

Visual Studio Online

Today marks the beginning of a new era for Visual Studio with the availability of Visual Studio Online.

Visual Studio has evolved over the years. Starting with an integrated developer environment for the desktop, Visual Studio expanded to also include team development capabilities on the server with Team Foundation Server. We are now taking the next step, extending the Visual Studio IDE with a collection of developer services, hosted in Azure, which offers the best integrated end-to-end development experience for modern applications.

Today, we are announcing the availability of a broad range of developer services as part of Visual Studio Online. Several services that have been available in Team Foundation Service are now in public preview as part of Visual Studio Online: hosted source control, work item tracking, collaboration and a build service. The elastic load testing service we released in limited preview earlier this year is also now available in public preview as part of Visual Studio Online. In addition, we are announcing two new Visual Studio Online services: Visual Studio Online Application Insights and Visual Studio Online “Monaco”.

Visual Studio Online is free for teams up to 5 users. The combination of Visual Studio Express and the free plan for Visual Studio Online make it simple for developers to get started in a friction-free way. Visual Studio Online is also included as part of MSDN subscriptions. New Visual Studio Online subscription plans, including access to the Visual Studio Professional IDE, are also available starting today. You can check out the plans, and get started with VS Online at http://visualstudio.com/.

Visual Studio Online is made up of many services, including the following:

Hosted Source Control

Visual Studio Online provides developers with hosted source control, using either Git or Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC). The sources for your Visual Studio Online projects are readily available to sync to your desktop when you are logged into Visual Studio.

Work Items and Agile Planning

Whether you are managing a project’s work item backlog or planning for the next sprint, Visual Studio Online provides tools to support you agile development process.

Hosted Build Service

Visual Studio Online includes a hosted build service, making it easy to move your project’s builds to the cloud. Build results are available in both Visual Studio Online and Visual Studio 2013, providing an smooth integrated development experience.

Every Visual Studio Online account provides 60 minutes of free build time per month, making it friction free to get started with hosted build.

Elastic Load Test Service

Performance and load testing are important pieces of the application lifecycle, enabling validation and analysis of the behavior of the application under load. Load testing entails highly dynamic resource needs, quickly scaling up to simulate large numbers of concurrent users. With the Visual Studio Online load testing service, this scalability can be offloaded to the cloud. Visual Studio users get a fully integrated experience in the IDE for managing and running load tests.

The elastic load test service is available in public preview starting today. Visual Studio Ultimate subscribers get 15,000 virtual user minutes per month as part of their subscriptions.

Application Insights

The new Application Insights service enables teams to support agile application delivery across an organization by providing visibility into how an application runs and is being used by customers. Application Insights collects live telemetry data across development, test and production environments and captures availability, performance and usage data, providing development teams with a 360-degree view of an application’s health. More than just a monitoring and analytics tool, Application Insights connects this valuable and actionable application data to the rest of your development lifecycle.

The Application Insights service is available today in limited preview, with initial support for .NET and Java applications running on Windows Server and Windows Azure, as well as Web and Windows Phone 8 applications.

“Monaco”

As we look to extend the desktop IDE with services in the cloud, we naturally asked ourselves about whether it makes sense to offer a development experience directly in the browser. The desktop IDE provides a rich, broad and integrated developer experience for a range of platforms. But we believe there are some scenarios where we can offer light-weight, friction free developer experiences in the browser for targeted platform experience in the cloud.

Visual Studio Online “Monaco” is a coding environment for the cloud, in the cloud. It complements the desktop IDE as a low friction experience that will help you get started, or make quick changes, to an existing cloud service. And it is integrated with Visual Studio Online.

Today, we are releasing a preview of one of the experiences that “Monaco” will provide for Azure Websites. Developers will now be able to edit their sites directly from the web, from any modern browser, on any device.

“Monaco” is already being used as the technology behind other cloud-based developer experience, from Office 365 “Napa” development to SkyDrive file editing.

With today’s launch of Visual Studio 2013, we have 123 products from 74 partners available already as Visual Studio 2013 extensions. As part of an ecosystem of developer tools experiences, Visual Studio continues to be a platform for delivering a great breadth of developer experiences.

Xamarin

The devices and services transformation is driving developers to think about how they will build applications that reach the greatest breadth of devices and end-user experiences. We’ve offered great HTML-based cross platform development experiences in Visual Studio with ASP.NET and JavaScript. But our .NET developers have also asked us how they can broaden the reach of their applications and skills.

Today, I am excited to announce a broad collaboration between Microsoft and Xamarin. Xamarin’s solution enables developers to leverage Visual Studio, Windows Azure and .NET to further extend the reach of their business applications across multiple devices, including iOS and Android.

The collaboration between Xamarin and Microsoft brings several benefits for developers today. First, as an initial step in a technical partnership, Xamarin’s next release that is being announced today will support Portable Class Libraries, enabling developers to share libraries and components across a breadth of Microsoft and non-Microsoft platforms. Second, Professional, Premium and Ultimate MSDN subscribers will have access to exclusive benefits for getting started with Xamarin, including new training resources, extended evaluation access to Xamarin’s Visual Studio integration and special pricing on Xamarin products.

Visual Studio 2012 Update 4

As I mentioned last month, since we released Visual Studio 2012 just over a year ago, we’ve seen the fastest adoption ever for a release of Visual Studio, with over 6M downloads.

When we released Visual Studio 2012, we committed to delivering regular updates to provide continuous value to Visual Studio customers. In the last year, we have released 3 updates to Visual Studio. Even better, over 60% of Visual Studio 2012 users are running the updates.

Today, we are making available Visual Studio 2012 Update 4. Update 4 includes bug fixes and product improvements, as well as changes that ensure great compatibility between Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio Online.

Conclusion

Today begins a new era for Visual Studio, extending the desktop IDE with a collection of rich developer services in the cloud. The combination of Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio Online, MSDN and Windows Azure provides the most complete experience for modern application development for the cloud in the era of devices and services. Welcome to Visual Studio 2013 and Visual Studio Online!

Project Monaco is the future of development. We'd (Codenvy) like to find ways to work with Microsoft to promote the adoption of browser-based IDEs. There is low penetration in the market today, but this is the future of development as cloud environments can eliminate the configuration hassles that developers face and also offer organizations higher degrees of control by applying policies across groups of workspaces. I'd appreciate someone from the MSFT Visual Studio Monaco team following up with us. We'd like to discuss a collaboration around instant, on-demand workspaces that could be mutually beneficial.

Visual Studio has evolved over the years, yes it sure has, too bad in the wrong direction. Why do you keep coming out with new products when the bug list and unfinished features in Visual Studio are so numerous it is mind boggling. I truly believe you have no idea what you are doing and the development community as a whole would be best served with your resignation.

I notice that there's a console in the Monaco IDE, could you give us some detail about what technology is powering that console? It's clearly not any kind of shell or powershell so I'm guessing it's a rudimentary command parser.

Either way, for Monaco to be able to compete with the likes of Cloud9 IDE, it really needs to be able to run commands on the server, like sass –watch, similarly to msbuild. Otherwise it won't be great for modern web development.

Is there a way I can get a Visual Studio Online account by linking my TFS service account? I tried but it says all my MSDN accounts are '(excluded)' and forces me to select a PAYG subscription… Which I assume would be bad to use?

@Pete Miller – Today the console in Monaco is a command parser and the commands execute within the context of the Azure website. It is rich, but it is not PowerShell and it does have boundaries to maintain security and stability of the site. SASS support has some challenges in this environment that we are looking into. Thanks for the interest in Monaco, keep watching!

Congratulations on a fine release. Visual Studio Online will be an interesting innovation and something to keep an eye on. However, it is not right for all teams. Can you please state whether VS Next will also be available as a desktop application? Or will VS 2013 be the last?

Name "Visual Studio Online" is very misleading. It is not Visual Studio as tool, but bunch of web services. Even Visual Studio is not requierd to use these services, and you can use Eclipse, XCode or any other IDE framework with right plugin.

Can I use Visual Studio Online Professional account, just to get VS 2013 Pro for non-azure development ?

Everyone, go look at coderun (http://www.coderun.com) if you want to see Visual Studio in the cloud. And it's FREE. It's so close it's scary. Go to the URL, you dont need an account, and fire it right up. MS could learn from these guys.

@Simon to link Azure and VSOnline together (to purchase license or resources) you cannot link to an MSDN Azure Subscription, you do require a different subscription type such as a PAYG. Any charges incurred will be billed to that subscription. Here is a link to an overview article http://www.visualstudio.com/…/set-up-billing-for-your-account-vs. Let us know if we can help in any way.

Sources stored at a MS data center? Great move for a company that has started gathering data for ad profiling in Windows 8.1. Now they start gathering source code. Guess for what! And not a single word from Mr. Somasegar in his announcement on security and privacy.

@Yoda / @Paranoid / @Jörg Debus – Details of the privacy policy for Visual Studio developer services are here: http://www.visualstudio.com/…/privacy-policy-vs. With Team Foundation Server 2013, you can also continue to manage source code and work items on-premise if you would prefer.

VS is slow and buggy running on a C: DRIVE it has to be unusable running over the internet unless you have a dedicated T-3 connection hooked up to your workstation. Yes another wasted release from Microsoft sigh….

Good job VS team! VS2013 does seem to be quicker than 2012 and the online offering is a real step in the right direction. I've given the online editor a go – works well- and will be kicking the tyres over the next few weeks.

Great job; best IDE is getting better. Do you envision native C++ with natively compiled UI as open platform that can be used as desktop (desktop like) application with flexible sizing, multiple overlapping windows being able to interact with other applicatoins etc.? We are all multitaskers now and Modern UI is very limiting (I work 10 Windows apps at this moment, talk on the phone, and browse – all on one desktop)

The details on MSVS 2013 pro upgrade are weird, part of page says you have to have retail version of msvs 2012, yet other part of store page says any pervious version of msvs works? Which is it? Really hoping any version so I can start on 8.1 apps. Also, is it retail box versions only? Or those of us who used to buy our own msdn accounts (czant use work one, not even to learn off hours) and had to let it expire for finacial reasons (I support a special ed classroom that my wife teaches; have to buy all her supplies as districts to poor), can we use the upgrade? Also can I report oddity of msdn issue to someone not on here? Noticed with an issue with my old account you may want to know about…

Today begins a new era for Visual Studio, extending the desktop IDE with a collection of rich developer services in the cloud. The combination of Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio Online, MSDN and Windows Azure provides the most complete experience for modern application development for the cloud in the era of devices and services. Welcome to Visual Studio 2013 and Visual Studio Online!

@Charles Ryan: Visual Studio Online ships every 3 weeks. Functionality in Visual Studio Online is rolled into Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio on a regular basis. See some details on this here: http://www.visualstudio.com/…/release-archive-vso.

@mk: Certainly, the traditional Windows desktop is an important application development target and will be for a long time to come. Visual Studio 2013 supports many development technologies for targeting the desktop, including for C++ development.

@Nzulwana Siyabonga: Consider reporting the issue on the MSDN Forums or StackOverflow with some additional details.

Visual Studio has grown from a desktop Integrated Developer Environment to team development proficiencies on the server (using the Team Foundation Server). But Visual Studio Online brings about the new undistinguished phase offering the best cohesive endways development experience for the latest, freshest applications.

It offers a rich variety of service for easy and fast development. And with collaboration between Microsoft and Xamarian for mobile development in C# made easy.

My idea is the new kind of hackathon. "Fair Hackaton". Say we have 24 hours hackathon rule – team up to 5 members. But some team has a 2 or 3 member. Not fair. The new hackthon's rule could be only one – 120 man hours (5×24). The team must register their project at VisualStudio online and spend up to 120 man hours minus hackathon time. "to spend" I mean to use online version of VS. For example, the 2 members team can complete the project up to 60%(72 online hours) before a hackathon when they will spend other 48 man-hours. Ofcourse Jury must have the ability to control this resource and the fact of using VS online (only) for all team members. It will be fair. No?

@Artёm Smirnov: When you create a new project in Visual Studio Online, it begins with an empty source code repository. If you look at the "Code" tab in the newly created project, you will see instructions for either cloning the empty repository to begin work on a fresh project or pushing an existing repository from Visual Studio or an existing local repository. Visual Studio Online does not currently have a set of specific project templates like the Visual Studio IDE has. If you want to create a new project from one of these templates, you can do that from Visual Studio and push to a Visual Studio Online project. (And similarly, if you want to create a project from a template in another IDE environment and push that to Visual Studio Online, you can do that too).

Tried to get the £100 upgrade but the vendor says that our volume licences are not eligible, the offer only applies to retail licences. There is no way that management will authorize another full price upgrade so soon after the last one. We had to argue pretty hard for the upgrade to VS2012 on the basis of the promised C++11 updates – a promise that was reneged upon. And now that some of those C++11 features have finally trickled into VS2013, we are left out in the cold. Not happy!

@Jim – Visual Studio Professional 2012 purchased through Volume Licensing is also eligible for the Upgrade offer. However you would need to purchase it through the online Microsoft Store and there is a limit of 10 per customer.

@Samit: Thanks for the reply. It's a good thing I posted here, then! Grey Matter were very specific in saying that the Microsoft Store upgrade was only for the retail version. I will inform them of their error.

I read above that the upgrade offer on vs2013 professional purchased via the store applies to volume licensing. Does it also apply to vs2012 previously acquired through msdn after the subscription has expired (but with perpetual licenses on existing software available at the time)?

@Soma

I like the way vs2013 is going and the tie in with Xamarin is interesting. Wish this 'joint venture' was modelled around what the Unite guys (http://www.youtube.com/watch) are doing as the adoption there is astounding. Their asset store is also a very clever idea and has even created several businesses. Not only can you get started easily on a budget but the learning materials are available on their site. Should add I am not associated with Unite in any way.

it takes forever to install on an AMD FX6100 with 16GB DDR3 ram over a reasonably fast network, and even longer to uninstall – it doesn't come with the "REMOVE" option or an uninstaller so uninstalling it from Windows7pro 64bit Programs and Features is hard to tell if its coming or going. This is the future of development? the future of development is open source

We procure MS Licenses through local vendors in India. In December 2013 they provided VS-2012 License stating that VS-2013 is not available in India. So we accepted VS-2012. After delivering License keys to us they said that we can get upgrade at a fee. We okayed and requested for upgrade. Now they are saying that upgrade is not possible. We would prefer to go TFS route with VS 2013. Who should we speak to at MS?

You may also want to look at Visual Studio Web Express or the Visual Studio Professional Trial. These offer rich desktop development environments for Azure which connect seamlessly to Visual Studio Online. You could also consider Visual Studio Online Professional which includes a subscription license to Visual Studio Professional. http://www.visualstudio.com/…/visual-studio-online-overview-vs.

I am new to C++ in a Windows environment. I have the source (C++ and assembler) of a small Windows application that I want to extend. It was developed under vs2008. I have been unable to determine whether Visual Studio Online offers the facilities to develop and re-build it without my having to obtain a compiler and assembler on my desktop? (This should be a very small development and cannot justify new software for just a few weeks.)